


Unfinished Business

by JackedofSpades



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: But just before Glass Cannon, Gen, Post Revenant Gun, an attempt at canon compliance was made, and how Cheris sees herself now, introspection about the Cheris/Jedao memory dynamic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 02:07:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,726
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841897
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JackedofSpades/pseuds/JackedofSpades
Summary: Yuletide 2019 fill for Nemonus!I went with the prompt of a sort of hybrid of fix-it fic for the end of Revenant Gun that immediately rolls into the events in Glass Cannon. I tried to explore the restlessness Cheris feels undercover in the Mwennin colony, and also to explore her identity and the level to which she sees herself as Jedao or not. I hope it satisfies you!
Comments: 1
Kudos: 12
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Unfinished Business

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bioluminesce](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bioluminesce/gifts).



The first thing I did when I entered my room in my new residence in the Mwennin colony was take down the mirrors. It wasn't from any strong emotional trigger, but a mechanical one. I found the glass was down and tucked into the back of my little closet before I seemed to register I had done it. Strange, but probably nothing to worry about. Considering. 

I think more or less I processed things through muscle memory for the first few months. Not that I didn't learn new names and faces, that I didn't enjoy learning the individual interests of my students, or the names of the dramas the local baker shared with me in detail as I picked up my order.

It wasn't uncomfortable or particularly traumatic, to think back to what had happened, what I had done and how I had done it. If I had been someone else, my emotional inertness would be the first and most obvious Shuos-colored flag, but I wasn't someone else, which was the strangest thing. Beyond all else, I simply did what I had always done--advance at all costs.

So I slogged through the mundanity. Math proofs. Children yelling. Delicious meat pasties. Enough of it would drive me insane, but insanity never hindered my ability to survive before, so again, I didn't think much of it.

Then one evening, things became complicated. I was trying desperately to look normal at a local eatery down near the community's central hub. I had made a habit of being seen with my roommates and even attempted to socialize with a handful of my student's parents in the appropriate public spaces. For the most part, this wasn't unpleasant. Pleasantly buzzed, I was enjoying being flirted with by the wife of one of my student's mothers when three gun shots rang in the distance. 

I reached for my Patterner 52 in between the space of the first and second shot. I was utterly bemused to find it missing and allowed myself to be pulled down under the bar for cover by my student's mother's wife. Silently I kicked myself for the mistake; I knew two Shuos agents were watching me as I entered the eatery and hoped my behavior read to them as surprise and to any Mwennin as shock. 

After the initial three shots, I heard yelling in the distance. In Mwen-dal. Again I tried to find my gun, and settled for a butter knife instead. I scanned the eatery and the courtyard that it spilled into outside. One of the Shuos agents was gone, the other staring directly at me. And it was only then I realized I could do absolutely nothing, even if they had let me.

How to explain to my students the next day that their short, fussy math instructor just happened to silt the throat of whoever (for some reason, I imagined Mikodez) was firing on their fellow colonists? As much as I hated it here (I hated it here?), the thought of compromising the mission in that way (mission?) was unacceptable. If I was going to leave, it wouldn't be sloppy and unprepared.

I broke eye contact with the other Shuos and sat back down and tried to sound scared as I put my arm around my student's mother's wife, but I'm pretty sure whatever chance I had with her wasn't a non-zero number. For some reason, I was relieved by this. 

An hour later, everyone was back to eating and socializing almost as if nothing had happened. What had happened was funny only in retrospect, probably because I have seen so many atrocities that my sense of humor is permanently skewed. One of the Shuos agents, not one of the two who had been watching me at the bar but a third agent, had been found out by their Mwennin lover. The Mwennin man was drunk, and had somehow wrestled a gun off of their Shuos partner. They had fired three shots, directly into their lover's favorite tea set. They had screamed some hysterical admittal that they were having an affair with a separate Shuos agent, who happened to be the one who _had_ disappeared from the eatery, and then the found-out Shuos agent had pulled a second gun and shot him, non-fatally. 

It would make an excellent drama, hopefully within the next year or so.

In any case, I was rather smug with myself when I heard the story the next day at lunch from my fellow instructors. Mostly because if the general population knew Shuos spies were involved, then Mikodez would have a headache inducing amount of paperwork to do, simply because I was in the vicinity of the altercation. And he would have to change out agents, which again, was funny.

I still walked home with the usual amount of paranoia, but I couldn't help the small thrill the previous night's events caused in me. It was absolutely minuscule, compared to literally any other thing I had done before coming here. But it wasn't nothing, and oftentimes, it's the tiniest values that make the difference.

My roommates were still out and wouldn't be home until later in the evening so I allowed myself the indulgence of taking over the kitchen and common space for my leisure. After I did my usual security checks around the house, I made a simple but hearty onion soup for myself and left it to simmer while I sat at the table and cut out a dozen crude fencing practice targets. In the center of each target, I drew a little fox.

I took down a painting off the wall in the common space and fixed the target on the space where it had been. There were several holes on the wall already from when I had done this before, the logic being that no one would ever see it so long as the painting covered it. If any Shuos had bugged the house (and I was reasonably certain they hadn't, but still) then it would be better to for them to see me practicing fencing on my wall than secreted away past the atmo dome in some makeshift shooting range where they could abduct me more easily.

I put on a playlist that was mostly made up of songs from my favorite dramas that had acceptable tempos for medium-level physical activity, did my warm-up stretches, and began my footwork.

I'm not sure how it was encoded, or if truly the effect is caused from calendrical influence or if I'm simply tapping into lucid hallucination, but when I began my lunges, the two of them appeared.

Ajewen Cheris stood to my left, Garach Jedao Shkan to my right. I lunged.

"Decent," Jedao said. His tone was neutral but since he was me, he was a bad liar.

"You've been slacking on practice. Grading too many papers, I think." Cheris, her body turned so that we faced the same way, her arm up and hand empty as if she was trying to puppet my body to hit the target for me.

What could I say to them? Most of the time my survival strategy involved mimicking a facsimile of Cheris. For one, I was a woman-form, so it was easier to operate on the assumption that others would gender me as a woman. In practice, it didn't always go that way, but my Jedao-half was the one without my original body. Or, I did (sort of?), but I would rather not think about that version of me at the moment, if only because the nomenclature was beginning to get out of hand.

I adjusted my footing and raised an eyebrow at the perfectly ordinary shadow that spread from my feet. Jedao leaned down, his mess of bangs falling forward over his eyebrows, twitching on the tops of his eyelashes. "Are you all right? You seem manic."

What had happened yesterday was the first interesting thing that had happened to me in months. It pained me to play at the role the math instructor, Dzannis Paral as much as I was pretending it didn't. I loved the Mwennin, loved knowing that they had a chance for recouping their numbers and living, after everything I did to them. It wasn't a normal life, but it was _a_ life. And though a part of me, no matter how infinitesimally small and shot to pieces and rearranged and glued back together that part might end up being, would always be Mwennin, the simple truth was that I was very much no longer Ajwen Cheris.

So that is how I saw it then. Cheris had all of her original memories (that I knew of) in her original (if not slightly surgically altered) body. This made her the... lead. In this particular arrangement. And Jedao was the... Well. Jedao acquiesced to that lead. 

Except when he didn't. Except when a gun fired or he tasted blood or when the baker's assistant boy bent over to pull the buns out of the oven.

Cheris was the operating system but Jedao was the software. No--wait.

"Does it really matter, at this point?" Cheris folded her arms and leaned against the wall the target was on, her ear a hand's width away from the target. I lunged and got the fox I had drawn on the target in the eye. "Everything's over now, so really all that matters is learning to live with it."

Except that wasn't true. Things were unfinished, and it was like the state of the world was a question being asked in class, and I was the child who had been called on too many times, yet waved my hand frantically hoping teacher would call on me to let me just solve the damn thing since nobody else was volunteering.

"But we are the teacher now." We. Yes I suppose we were. Jedao might enjoy it, but he missed the insanity as much as I did. This, actually, explained a lot.

I heard my roommate at the door and quickly hung the painting back in its place and ducked into my room to toss my rapier on my bed. I offered her soup and poured a bowl for myself and made up a lie about needing to grade papers while I ate and retreated to my bedroom. I ate my soup.


End file.
